The Italian Cinema: Beyond Neo-Realism

In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Italy became the national force behind one of the most important movements in the modern cinema: the Italian Neo-Realist movement. Beginning with such films as Rome: Open City (Italy 1945) by Roberto Rossellini and La Terra Trema (Italy 1947) by Luchino Visconti, as well as the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Vittorio De Sica, the Italian cinema brought to the art of film making an overt social and political consciousness. With the fall of Mussolini's Fascist government and the end of the Fascist controls which had stifled the Italian cinema of the 1930s, an energetic spirit of film making literally took to the streets of Rome.

Though the filmmakers of the Neo-Realist movement were very different from each other, they shared certain common concerns. The recent political history and diverse social conditions of modern Italy were the central subject matter of the original Neo-Realist productions. Likewise, the Neo-Realist filmmakers combined a seemingly objective cinematic style with subjective, and overtly political, viewpoints. Whether they were moderate democratic figures like Rossellini and De Sica, or avowed Marxists like Visconti and, later, Bernardo Bertolucci, the filmmakers of the Neo-Realist movement immersed themselves in the vivid turmoil of contemporary Italy.

Aesthetically, the Neo-Realist movement presented the triumph of spatial realism over editing and montage. Long-takes and camera motion be­came the chief tools of this cinema. In these films, the artificial recon­struction of reality through the editing process was replaced by an intense concern for the ever changing nature of an open-ended sense of composition and perspective. The Neo-Realist camera would prowl the set (which often would be a real location), delineating the spatial dimensions perceived through the lens and allowing the compositional elements of the image to shift and change.

By the mid-1950s, the Italian cinema began to change, but the basic tenets of Neo-Realism remained an important influence. Increasingly, new forces were being felt by Italian filmmakers and the Neo-Realist cinema had to adapt to the unique demands of the period. The need for increased pro­duction monies led Italian filmmakers into a series of co-production ventures. This meant, however, that Italian films had to address themselves to broader European concerns and risk losing some of their Italian perspective. The Italian filmmakers also began shifting away from the special realism of the early films and toward the more internalized concerns of psychoanalysis. The short-lived economic boom of the 1960s and the rapid expansion of modern industrialization created an increasing sense of alienation in Italian society as the ancient landscapes and cities were seemingly replaced by the dehumanizing forms of modern technology. This resulted in a nostalgia for the pre-Fascist past, especially the 19th century and the agrarian culture of the Italian countryside. This nostalgia was not, however, uncritical; Italians explored their past in search of the roots of their contemporary problems.

It was because of these complex and diverse forces that the Italian cinema entered its second great period during the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, a second generation of major film­makers emerged and many of the earlier artists of the Neo-Realist movement entered new stages in their own development, producing films which were sometimes even more impressive than their original work. It was an active and dynamic decade that still overshadows the minor achievements of the 1980s. In this program, we present some of the significant films in the Italian cinema during this last great period.

One of the most famous of the second generation filmmakers to appear in the 1960s was Bernardo Bertolucci. Though The Conformist (Italy/France/W.Germany 1970) was his first film to receive wide inter­national attention, Bertolucci was already known in Italy for his work both as a filmmaker and as a poet. His earliest films, such as Before the Revolution (Italy 1964) and The Spider's Stratagem (Italy 1970), were expressive of his political concerns with Marxist ideals as well as his revisionist view of recent Italian history. He became increasingly concerned, however, with Freudian psychology and sexuality, as demonstrated in his production of Last Tango in Paris (Italy/France 1972) and Luna (Italy/USA 1979). While Marxism and Freudianism are not necessarily contra­dictory, Bertolucci's growing interest in psychology paralleled his dis­enchantment with conventional Marxist politics. Both The Conformist and, especially, 1900 (Italy/USA 1976) are indicative of this developing con­tradiction in his films.

The question of sexual identity and political commitment are central to The Conformist. The film's narrative, in which Jean-Louis Trintignant's character attempts to hide a homosexual episode from his youth by mindlessly conforming to the Fascist society around him, suggests the coercive nature of ideology. Though his father is an imprisoned Leftist, Trintignant's character joins Mussolini's political party and becomes a member of the Fascist secret service. The meaninglessness and banality of his actions are ultimately exposed by a series of political, sexual, and finally, murderous confrontations in which his lack of convictions results in brutal­ity and betrayal.

Though his best-known films are those of the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni originally emerged as part of the Neo-Realist movement. His earliest feature films, such as Cronaca di un Amore (Italy 1950), were already moving toward a cool, austere stylization which prefigured the abstract and demanding aesthetics of his later works. With the production of L'Avventura (Italy 1959), La Notte (Italy 1960), L'Eclisse (Italy 1962), and Red Desert (Italy 1964), Antonioni created a stunning series of films which successfully redefined the spatial concerns of the Italian cinema.

In Red Desert, as in his other films, the spatial relationships of Antonioni's compositions emphasize negative space and accent the strange and ugly appearance of the industrial landscape surrounding the film's characters. This was also Antonioni's first film in color; he used a striking range of garish contrasts and monochromatic design in order to invoke the madness and alienation felt by Monica Vitti's character. With Red Desert, Antonioni created a genuinely disturbing vision of a world dominated by slag heaps, factories, and industrial waste.

Like Antonioni's career, Pietro Germi's went back to the beginning of the Neo-Realist movement. Though Germi had a long film making career and had produced a substantial range of works, he is probably best known for two comedy films of the 1960s--Divorce, Italian Style (Italy 1962) and Seduced and Abandoned (Italy 1964).In these films, Germi presented a series of bitingly savage satires on Italian society and mores.

In Seduced and Abandoned, Germi deals with the contradictions of Sicilian culture and the self-serving mentality of the Italian male. The film's black humor systematically exposes the hypocrisies of the characters' actions and outlines the particular conditions of Sicilian life. As in Germi's other comedy films, the slapstick and farce of Seduced and Abandoned succeeds in chastening the more dubious aspects of Italian behavior.

As a filmmaker, novelist, poet, and essayist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most important — and most controversial — Italian artists of the 1960s, Even his violent death in 1975 remains a subject of heated debate. His films, however, provide a complex legacy which ranged from the harsh Neo-Realist statement of Accattone (Italy 1961) to the psychological and political subject matter of Teorema (Italy 1968) and Pigsty (Italy 1969). The abrasive, and often extreme, nature of Pasolini's films made him an unusual director for a religious film. Yet his production of The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (Italy 1966) is one of the few serious and intelligent works ever made on the life of Christ.

The film was a fairly close adaptation of Saint Matthew's gospel, tracing the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Resurrection. By using a documentary style of photography and a cast of non-professionals for his cast, Pasolini invoked the spirit and stylization of the Neo-Realist cinema. In the film, he places a strong emphasis on Christ's place within the context of the politics and history of the gospel's time period. In making The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Pasolini attempted to create a grand synthesis of Christianity and Marxist politics. In the process, he created a film of unique intensity and integrity.

The paradoxical life and career of Luchino Visconti parallels the contradictions of modern Italy. A direct heir to the Visconti title, he rejected his aristocratic heritage and became a member of the Italian Communist Party. As one of the founding members of the Neo-Realist movement, Visconti actually lived with Sicilian peasants and fishermen during the production of La Terra Trema. Yet Visconti was a supreme aesthete whose films contained an odd combination of Marxist analysis and operatic grandeur. By the 1960s and 1970s, his films were obsessed by history and decadence as he articulated a series of visual treatises on the futilities and failures of politics and art.

Visconti's production of Death in Venice (Italy/France 1971) was a curiously personal production for him. Based on the novella by Thomas Mann, the theme of both the story and film were close to Visconti's own personal situation and concerns. His failing health and growing estrange­ment from the modern world was similar to that of the central character of Death in Venice and the eulogistic tone of the film was indicative of Visconti's own feeling of nostalgia as well as knowledge of the deceits of history and the social bankruptcy of the past.Bern

The Films of Bernardo Bertolucci: Marx and the Oedipus Complex

A long-standing, and often antagonistic, division has existed between Marxist political theory and Freudian psychology. One example of this split was the official Soviet rejection of psychoanalysis during the rule of Stalin. Likewise, there have been numerous accounts from the Hollywood blacklist period of Party members who were convinced by their psychoanalysts to "name names" as part of their therapy. For many Marxist thinkers, the subjective universe of Freud was a narcissistic rejection of scientific materialism. In turn, many psychoanalysts treated communism as a neurotic manifestation of the Oedipus complex. Within the orthodox views of both camps, no point of reconciliation seemed possible. It is within this framework that the films of Bernardo Bertolucci occupy a unique position.

Bertolucci first became prominent in Italy for his work as a poet and critical essayist. He was, however, increasingly drawn to the cinema through his friendship with Pier Paolo Pasolini and his work as assistant director on Pasolini's production of Accattone (Italy 1961). Pasolini's own position as poet and filmaker, as well as his status as a renegade Marxist, demonstrated to Bertolucci that a complex synthesis of politics, art, and psychology was possible. Further, the cinematic legacy of Italian Neo-Realism gave Bertolucci a model from which he could freely borrow, even while he was rejecting much of its simpler, more sentimental vision of left-wing politics (though his 1977 production of 1900 is virtually the last Neo-Realist epic ever filmed).

From Pasolini, Bertolucci derived a sharp awareness of the interaction between the personal and political worlds, especially in the arena of sexual politics. From the previous generation of Neo-Realist filmakers, he inherited an appreciation for the formal and moral possibilities of the cinema. With his discovery of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolucci learned to view the cinema as a uniquely political medium. This pedigree enabled Bertolucci to mix his commitment to radical politics within a framework of psychoanalytic concern.

A recurring theme in Bertolucci's films is the Freudian concept of the Oedipus complex. This theory concerning infantile sexuality, in which the child subconsciously wishes to usurp the position of the father in relationship to the mother, is traditionally presented in psychoanalysis as the primal event in a person's mental development. Further, the resolution of this conflict through the repression of the oedipal urge is viewed not only as the first step toward therapeutic adjustment but also as one of the major foundations of the social structure. Bertolucci sees the Oedipus complex as a primary component to both psychological and political awareness. He does not, however, view repression as the only correct resolution of the complex. In turn, the father figure represents more than simply parental authority, but also the patriarchal structures of the state.

The failure to resolve this conflict in either direction is part of the text of Before the Revolution (Italy 1964). Though the title of the film is taken from Talleyrand -- "He who did not live in the years before the (French) Revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of living is" -- the emotional tone of the work is more directly summarized by the hero's admission that for him, "life will always be before the revolution." This alienating sense of being suspended between a complacent middle-class and a radical proletariat permeates the film as its central character finds himself dissatisfied with his own class, but also realizes that he is not capable of being culturally aligned with the communist workers. He rejects the world of his father (and the affair with his aunt is a substitution for the mother), but he cannot sucessfully follow the revolutionary path advocated by his intellectual mentor, the second father figure in the film. He fails to come to any significant resolution of the crisis and, seemingly, is destined to drift.

In The Spider's Stratagem (Italy 1970), the enigmatic figure of the father still controls the son despite the father's own death years earlier. Supposedly, the father died a martyr in the fight against fascism. History, however, can be a deceptive web through which one generation is capable of ensnaring the next. The degree to which the father has imposed himself upon the son is reinforced in the film by the fact that the same actor plays both parts. Throughout The Spider's Stratagem, the romantic entanglements and political betrayls of the father systematically envelop the son, entrapping him within a personal history of deceit.

Bertolucci's most direct confrontation with the Oedipus complex is presented in Luna (USA/Italy 1979). The title symbolically refers to the mysterious qualities of sexuality contained within the figure of the mother in relationship to the ambivalent sensibilities of the adolescent male. Framed within the context of opera (the mother is a prima donna on tour in Italy), Bertolucci uses the artificial stage worlds of Verdi and Mozart as a means of reflecting the potentially destructive psychological events within the film's narrative. Like the myth that is its namesake, the Oedipus complex contains within it the brutal possibilities of tragedy, and the son's passage through his interior crisis will be critical in determining his entry into maturity. The ambiguous ending of Luna, in which the father must finally assert himself, is not so much a reconciliation as it is a brief pause in a process of psychological development that must continue long after the film has ended.

Luna recongizes that the Oedipus complex, when viewed from the position of the mother and son, contains a potential for tragedy. In The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (Italy 1981), the complex is presented from the father's perspective. From this viewpoint, the complex becomes the basis for black comedy. The father is the ridiculous man of the film's title, the contradictory representative of a previous generation who must eventually be replaced by the new. The convoluted, and ultimately unresolved, mystery plot of the film is indicative of the father's inability to accept his powerlessness in resolving, and eventually manipulating, his son's crisis. In turn, he only gradually realizes that the crisis is actually his own and that he must simply accept the fact that "the son always replaces the father."